www.affiliateconfession.com

Yes, it’s time for another reasonably healthy dinning adventure from Affiliate Confession. Salsas Mex Corp was the latest restaurant discovery we literally just happened upon in the historic downtown Melbourne Florida area and it will definitely be put on our list of favorites. We were really heading out to go to another restaurant downtown 2 Friday nights ago and Jean just happened to see Salsas as we passed by, so we stopped in.

I spent some of my earliest years in the Phoenix Arizona area where my parents took us out for Mexican at least once a week, consequently I am a Mexican food fanatic so this was a gem of a find for my wife and I. The Downtown Melbourne area has all sorts of old houses and buildings from the 1800’s and early 1900’s and Salsas is one of those quaint homes turned restaurant with loving care. As soon as we entered we were met by simple, but authentic Mexican decor and felt comfortable and welcomed immediately.

After we looked around and talked to the waitress about the restaurant and when Salsas opened, it was time to get to the ordering process. We started the meal off with fresh guacamole and when I say fresh, I mean they make it when you order it, no sitting in the fridge all day. After ordering, we talked with the waitress a bit more and the owner, Gus Sanchez, came over and told us a little more about the restaurant and offered us a free margarita. It was free because it wasn’t actually on the menu yet. We gladly accepted.

When we got our meals we were surprised to see that they weren’t covered in cheese and the portions weren’t ginormous as many Mexican restaurants these days now do. Another popular Mexican restaurant in this area serves such huge portions covered with a mountain of cheese that I have at times made three meals out of one of their plates. Salsas was unlike that and even gave us the light cheese we requested. Everything on the menu is made fresh at the restaurant including the tortillas and salsa. They even serve their dishes with fresh whole cream instead of sour cream and use Manchego cheese which is a sheep’s milk cheese originating in Spain.

My order of the Tacos Dorados with potato filling:

Next time I wouldn’t get the potato filling as it was not what I had expected. It wasn’t the restaurant, potatoes in a taco were just a little odd for me, someone else might like it better. I’d probably go with a pico de gallo or grilled veggie filling next time. After talking with the waitress and owner, they seem willing to accommodate your nearly every custom culinary wish. All you have to do is ask.

The owner has extensive restaurant management and owner experience and once managed the busiest Outback Steakhouse in the nation. That experience shows in everthing from the decor, to the friendliness of the waitstaff, to the overall experience at Salsas.

If you ever pass through the Melbourne Florida area and are looking for a nice authentic Mexican meal then Salsas Mex Corp is the place to stop in.

In what will go down in Internet history as probably one of the lamest decisions ever in e-commerce, running second only to the firing of AOL CEO Jon Miller in 2006, eBay announced yesterday it will no longer allow any digitally downloadable product to be sold via an auction. You read that right, if you sell an ebook, digital recording, electronic forms, WordPress templates (or any template), digital graphics, ecards or anything else that can be transferred electronically, you are being kicked out of auctioning your goods on eBay like a red-headed stepchild. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

This utterly remarkable and shortsighted policy update was announced only 7 days before its scheduled implementation, giving those who make their living off of digital goods little recourse. All digital goods are scheduled to be removed from eBay auctions and stores as of March 31. All sellers of digital goods will now have to spend $9.95 per listing to place their products as a 30 day listed classified ad. This policy will put many eBay Power Sellers and hundreds to thousands of others effectively out of business because of the high initial cost of a classified ad. Sellers who market their digital downloads through eBay stores and have been able to list goods for mere pennies, cannot afford to list hundreds of ebooks, mp3’s and other items for $9.95 each.

eBay hastily decided this arcane policy because some digital sellers use these goods to manipulate the feedback system and artificially boost their status. The way this works is some sellers market near worthless ebooks for 1 to 99 cents and list hundreds of auctions only looking to increase their feedback numbers and ratings. So instead of eBay dealing with the problem, they make a blanket policy that hurts everyone, good and bad, who markets these products.

This is an incredibly ignorant move on eBay’s part. I have personally sold our Vegan Meal Planner on eBay via auction and classified style and have had much better success with auctions. Auctions excite people into making a buying decision, classified ads don’t.

If you are listening eBay, the answer is not to move backwards. Last time I looked at a calendar it was 2008, the digital information age, and the last company (AOL) that forgot where they were, lost more than 60% of their users nearly overnight. The answer is to deal with the people who manipulate the feedback system if that’s the problem, not to put legitimate merchants out of business.

To see how completely out of touch eBay is on this issue only requires one to read the completely inept statement issued just yesterday on their web site. Brian Burke, Director of Global Feedback Policy states, “Digital goods are often reproduced at little to no cost to the seller.” Well, yes they often are, but often they are not. My wife and I poured about 70 hours worth of work into our vegan meal planner and I am sure many information sellers spend multiples of those hours producing their products as well. The duplicity of this statement is evident in the fact that much of the junk, and I do mean junk, sold on eBay comes from the country that is the worst violator of human rights on the planet. Many of the hard goods sold on eBay are produced in the sweatshops of China, “at little to no cost to the seller.”

Lame eBay, just plain lame.

Sometimes you can just go along in life feeling like you know everything and then someone points out something to you or asks a question and you all of a sudden don’t feel like such a smarty. After Collin Lahay of Mixed Market Arts asked me a question about USFreeads.com I feel like I need to make a confession. It is a blogging sin of omission rather than commission. I assumed something was true when it turned out not to be.

I wrote a post a few days ago about using USFreeAds for traffic and links and as it turns out, you probably won’t gain much of a benefit in the links department by using this classified site. I had wrongly assumed that all the links you put in your ad as a Premium Member would earn you a link back to your site because they would be “do follow” links. After Collin’s question about whether the links were “no follow” I figured I probably should go and look for myself. It turns out all links at USFreeAds.com are “no follow” which at this point I’m having a little trouble with because Premium Members pay $9.95 per month to place ads on this site. My feelings are that if you are paying for a service, you should be getting the full benefits of that service, link juice included.

I will still be using USFreeAds because they have definitely provided traffic and earned me some income as I wrote about in this post using USFreeAds and Shopping Ads together. Occasionally ads do get ranked on the first page of Google for some of your search terms and you do end up getting traffic to your ads. Also, if you have a featured ad, you can redirect it to go to your site rather than going to the ad itself. I have featured ads that I let sit until they get ranked well in Google and then redirect thus getting that traffic coming directly to your offer rather than going through your classified on USFreeAds.com.

I will more closely evaluate USFreeAds over the next couple of months to see how much of a benefit it really provides and report back later.

You can check out USFreeAds.com here.

Matthew 28:5-7 - But the angel answered and said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. 6 He is not here; for He is risen, as He said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. 7 And go quickly and tell His disciples that He is risen from the dead, and indeed He is going before you into Galilee; there you will see Him. Behold, I have told you.”

Happy Easter to everyone! Hope you have a great time with family and friends today and aren’t doing something like blogging or even reading this post.

See you Monday.

I guess you know when your blog really starts to get noticed in the blogosphere because your Akismet Spam increases dramatically. This of course means that spammers the world over have located your blog and are targeting it with worthless comments hoping to get a link somewhere on your site.

Almost from the start, a new blog will get spam comments immediately, but then, out of nowhere those spam comments double or triple overnight. That happened to Affiliate Confession some time this past week. I haven’t been paying that close attention to my Akismet Spam count, but just noticed today in my comments interface the count is at 106 when it had been hovering between 40 and 50. Total spam comments caught by Akismet are at 1,155 since starting this blog. That’s not huge compared to other bloggers or some of my other blogs (42,460 blocked at our healthy diet podcast), but it’s the sudden increase that makes me suspect the flood is coming.

It is beyond my comprehension that some individuals still think you can benefit from trying to post useless garbage comments on other blogs and still purchase auto posting comment software. I’d like to know if anyone at this stage of the blogging game still benefits from time wasting activities such as this.

If you aren’t using Akismet, it comes free with your Wordpress install and it really is essential in your blogging ventures. It blocks 95% or so of the spam comments from you having to moderate them and keeps track of the kind of spam that does get through so it can be stopped in the future. You have to get a WordPress API key to use it which is a simple procedure and that helps the main Akismet database learn more about comment spammers and trap even more mindless comments. Once you get your API key, you can use it for any WordPress blog you have. All you have to do is activate it from your WordPress plug-ins interface, put in your WordPress API key and you’re all set, nothing more to do.

If you aren’t using Akismet, you are spending way to much time moderating comments on your blog.

Alan
PS - Posts will short and sweet for the next several days as my dad just got home from the hospital Wednesday after his open heart surgery and I will be spending time helping to deal with his situation and will be working on a few new projects. Consequently, I won’t have much time to blog.